Your Weekly Guide to VRV 3/26/18 – 4/1/18

After a long, arduous day at the office and a particularly hellish commute, you finally make it home to your apartment. All week, you’ve been thinking about an old video game you used to play, and tonight is the night you finally have time to break out your old game system and relive a bit of your childhood. After a bit of setup, and with pizza in hand, you’re all ready to go. You power on your TV, blow dust out of the cartridge, and turn the system on. For the first few levels, it’s exactly as you remember it. The sword slashes feel just as satisfying as you remember them and you even remember where a few hidden items are located. But, as you progress through the game, you start to notice that things are a bit peculiar. It’s just small glitches at first–a bit of garbled dialog text or a misplaced graphics sprite. But soon the glitches get worse. Characters appear with no eyes, the leaves of trees render as red instead of green, and areas begin to shift and change when you revisit them. You become increasingly frustrated, but continue to play, feeling almost strangely compelled to continue. The graphical glitches take a more and more macabre turn until trees look as if they are made of skin, ghastly faces appear in every window, and all of the water appears rust colored. Suddenly your TV goes black, and a line of text appears: “Your Weekly Guide to VRV.”